One of the most useless Olympic events.
Posted on 24 August 2008 | No responses
These Olympics games have been awesome. I loved watching the swimming, the opening ceremony was spectacular, to watch athletes putting in their best effort in being the fastest or strongest has just be incredible. Incredible until today… I Turn on NBC to see what is going on at the Bejing Olympics.. and I see what looks like Synchronized Team Rope Dancing AKA Gymnastics Rhythmic.
Are you Serious?!?!? A bunch of Girls/Women dancing around the gymnastic floor with ropes. UGH!!!! They are talking about this being Baseball and Softball’s last year in the Olympics.. but they keep this crap??? Has anyone ever heard of this except in the Olympics? This is almost a made up event. It is bad enough we have badmitton as a event, but seriously add events people really want to see.
Again AOL??? Really???
Posted on 17 August 2008 | 1 response
Just got done with a IM session with a friend of mine
it’s like October 2007 all over again!
the rumors are really wild this time
everything from closing down MTC and DTC
to whacking all of SI and IPE’s
I was through that mess once.. I really feel for my friends back at AOL. The current management, Randy Falco and Ron Grant, have really screwed that company. And my friends will suffer for their stupidity.
The rumors also say that performance bonuses will be stopped and the layoffs will be smaller. Mainly because they got burned last year by the “widespread-edness of the october layoff”. That means they can have smaller “focused” layoff and offer smaller layoff packages.
Nice…
Family Time
Posted on 31 July 2008 | No responses
My nephew, who I haven’t seen in almost 2 years, has been taking a training class in NJ and I had the opportunity to visit with him the past two weekends. We had such a good time together. We had a cookout, went to the movies, and just played games. It’s funny because he was telling me that some of his co-workers didn’t want to spend time with their family. Instead they went off and did other things. I’m so glad that we have a close family that like to do things together. The time spent to go and pick him up, which took almost 8 hours, were well worth the time–priceless.
Happy 4th
Posted on 4 July 2008 | No responses
What can I say, our blog is out dated! I’m sitting outside on our patio enjoying this beautiful 4th of July with the family. We were talking about weddings, birthdays, and anniversaries that are coming up in the family. My in-laws just celebrated their 60th anniversary yesterday. What a milestone! It’s going to be so rare for people in our generation to reach that many years.
Well let me tell you what’s been going on in the life of our family.
There’s been a few changes. Scotty started a new job with a company called Bantu about two month ago. He is no longer with AOL. He is still adjusting to the civilian/military world again and the bureaucracy that goes along with it. His commute is now about 10 miles shorter which will save on gas.
Erika spent this week here with us. She goes back tomorrow. She is on the hunt for a full-time teaching job so she can begin to enjoy her after-college life.
Amanda is beginning her sophmore year in college. She is transferring to Liberty this upcoming semester where she plans to pursue a Marketing/Business Bachelor’s Degree.
Nothing much is going on in my life. I still enjoy my job very much. Summer is my favorite time of the year. I love to sit outdoors and enjoy the weather. I know some of you are thinking that I’m probably nuts, but what can I say. I absolutely, hate too much cold weather. I think I’m allergic to winter.
Hope everyone has an enjoyable 4th of July.
Geneology
Posted on 2 April 2008 | No responses
Last week, I found out about this website www.geni.com which you can list your geneology and have the family continue posting their information to it. It is really cool. I started adding my relatives and as I’m entering the information, I realized that there are a lot of relatives that I have not seen or heard of in years. I’m hoping that we can continue to update so that I can see the rest of the family, and also find out my ancestry line as far back as I can. The web site is cool, guarantee you’ll love it.
The Pains of Car Shopping
Posted on 31 March 2008 | No responses
We went car shopping this weekend. We were looking to purchase a new car for one of our daughters. What attracted me to this dealership was a TV advertisement that we saw prior to leaving the house. They were advertising 2008 cars for under $10K. I knew it was too hard to believe because when looking at the value of those cars, they were listed for twice that price. When I got to the dealership, I told them that I wanted to buy one of those cars they had advertised for under $10K. They told me that it was a lease car for 3 years–because that’s when the $10K is up on the car. Not necessarily a lie but certainly very misleading, but I guess that’s how they get you to come to them.
My daughter and I went to several dealerships. I think that the sales people thought, as they see two females approaching that we would be an easy sell and that they can push us around. They tried all the tricks that they must teach them in sales school to try to get you to take the car home that day. I was shopping for a car, but I told them several times that I was not going to take a car home with me that day. First of all, I didn’t have my husband with me. I told him that I needed to go home and discuss it with my husband. Second of all, I did not want to rush into buying a car. I wanted to shop around and see what my best offer would be. So I said to them, if you want me to come back, you better make me the best deal possible to make me return.
At one of the dealership, the sales person comes back and brings back a piece of paper and offers me a payment schedule scenario. I asked him, what the payment scenario was based on. So he tries to explain, and I said to him that I don’t want you to show me the payment scenarios, that will get worked out when it’s time, but I wanted to see the bottom line number on the price of the car. Basically what they do is they try to show you the payments based on the deposits that you are going to make, but they don’t knock down the price of the car at all. We went on rounds and rounds of discussion saying the same thing. Finally, when I talked to the manager, about 2 1/2 hours later, I reiterated what I had told the sales person–I want to see the bottom line and then I would decide whether I want to come back or not. When he came back, I was shown a pretty good number, and I will most likely go back and purchase a car.
For the record, I hate car shopping, because it certainly kills your entire day, but if you have nothing else to do, well then it’s certainly entertaining.
I have updated already.. Paul…
Posted on 29 March 2008 | No responses
It has been a long time since I posted anything as one of my friends keeps telling me. Ok, so for him here it is… get off my back.
Well so many things have changed in the past few months, let me try to fill in the highlights.
- I left mail storage and moved over to portal services, the division that run most of the web services at AOL.
- I am now on my third new manager in less than six months.
- I was caught in the latest reorg at AOL, hence the third manager and I am getting all new projects at AOL.
- Bought a new Mac Book Pro laptop – I love it!!!!
- Erika graduated from Liberty in December, she will walk on May 10th.
Those are the highlights. Since the last reorg I am still waiting for my new projects. It looks like I will get AOL Latino, and AOL Games. I have not talked to the transition admins yet.
Other than that things are moving along. My parents wrecked their car last month, my dad at 88 decided to give up his driving license. Not a bad decision, when he drove it made mom crazy.
I will try to update a little more regularly, later.
I am working where?
Posted on 14 November 2007 | 4 responses
So my manager was laid off along with 749 other people last month. It has taken almost a full month for my tech director to decide how to split up the team. My thoughts, as with many, is that myself and the other web technology guy would go to the Portal team and the other 4 on the team would go to another messaging team.
Everything worked out with just one hitch that has most of us scratching our heads. I was moved to Mail Storage. Me, the guy on our team with the most web technology experience is working with storage arrays. I have zero experience with storage, but over 13 years experience with web technology. Yeah that is a good fit.
When I met with my tech manager and he told me what he was going to do, he seemed genuinely shocked that I was not happy about this move. “Not happy” does not truly get across what I feel about this move, “Mad enough to spit nails” come closer, “Mad enough to look for a new job” is closer still. This is a move backward for me, I have been trying to move into more visible projects. To get myself visible outside of my division. This move goes in the opposite direction, storage is a back end process within mail. From what I see I get nothing from this move but my tech manager can say that he has fixed a problem area in our division.
I need to resolve this, it is keeping me up at night, literally check out the timestamp on this post. That is 3 AM not PM.
Do you have a pumpkin eating form?
Posted on 31 October 2007 | No responses
This is stupidity in action. Tax law: Are you eating those pumpkins? – Yahoo News. If I were to purchase a pumpkins in Iowa to make pies, and I do make my pumpkin pies from fresh pumpkins, I need to fill out a form to get a tax exemption from the Iowa Department of Revenue.
They need to be careful, or else it will create an underground industry of pumpkin smugglers or bootleggers. Women will be recruited to be mules to smuggle pumpkins into the state pretending to be pregnant.
A sad day at AOL
Posted on 16 October 2007 | No responses
Today was the beginning of a huge layoffs at AOL. It was a very sad day to be at work. I watched as my friends and coworkers packed up their cubes and left the building. Even my manager was among the approximatly 750 people that are laid off. Most of everyone I have talked to can’t understand the capriciousness of the lay offs. Some of the groups in the company were completely laid off. One of the Network Operation Centers (NOC) in Columbus Ohio was dismantled. A NOC that we relied on to monitor our systems.
There was little work done today at the Dulles campus. By mid afternoon most people had left for the day or were rambling around the campus still numb from the sheer number and severity of the layoffs.